


Memory

by KoroMarimo



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Character Death, Child Reader, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other, Parent-Child Relationship, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 05:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12028959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KoroMarimo/pseuds/KoroMarimo
Summary: Memory is a funny thing.





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write this down because… I’m not sure.  
> Mostly because of my grandmother, who forgets things sometimes and talks to me in Spanish because she forgets I can’t really understand her. And for my grandfather I guess. I’ve thought a lot about him. And for the child I used to be, because I can’t remember a time when I actually talked out loud. I was always silently watching and listening.

Millennium was just like your home life nearly fifty five years ago. Being the youngest on board (besides Schrodinger, but he really didn’t count as far as you were concerned), the soldiers always treated you with a kind aloofness to them. Wrapped up in their own adult lives, you felt left out of the loop and remained quiet and watchful, never leaving your father’s side or lab. On occasion, the Doctor needed to be somewhere you couldn’t follow, but you weren’t always banished to his quarters at these times. Sometimes Major kept you company, but again, even he could exhibit that polite aloofness when another adult entered the room and interrupted the chat you would be having. You sat quietly watching in the shadows. Played solitaire just as the Dandy Man had showed you once before he too became consumed in his own private world. Sometimes Schrodinger wanted to play, but you pushed him away because his games didn’t interest you. He interested you when he was no more than a mewling kitten that looked like a human baby, but he could talk now and you hated him.

Yet there was one thing about Millennium that you relished: Here there was no confrontation. No shrieks or bitching or whining within earshot whenever you cloistered yourself away with your father. There was always screaming in the house back home in Dresden.

Your earliest memories consisted of screaming and crying from both of your parents, your father ranting and raving in his deadly baritone while your mother alternated between shrieking back and crying whenever she knew her argument was invalid. Sometimes your brother would tell you stories when you two were older, about how your father was blinded by love and docile at one point. The house had been peaceful. There were two other children that lived with them and your mother was silent, and then brother would throw it in your face that your birth had thrown a wrench into the mix. One Christmas however, you remembered the screaming had finally come to a head, and then stopped miraculously for the next ten years. Sometimes when Schrodinger would try your father’s patience, and his face would contort from defeat into blind rage, you would lean back your head and close your eyes as you remembered a time when he’d been silenced into submission. Then you thought: Ah, at last. The screams have subsided once and for all.

It was Christmas Eve, 1934. The daylight had passed and it was just beginning to get dark outside. You didn’t remember much of the house you lived in, only vague snippets like the wooden furniture or the dark colored rug in the living room. That was where one could often find you. Mother hadn’t let you out of the house, but your older brother Jonas had been darting in and out like a sparrow letting all the cold air in. For the older family members of your household that understood what was happening around them, a new world order was just beginning in the finite space of their country. Something had happened just a few months before that you didn’t understand. Your mother fretted around the house and pushed you out of the way when you were underfoot; your father was anxiously watching the window and muttering to no one while Jonas made a nuisance out of himself. He could get away with it being the oldest, but you knew better than to incur your mother’s wrath so close to a holiday. Instead you played quietly by the tree your father had hauled in the day before, content with amusing yourself with the hem of your dress and listening to everything that happened.

“Late…” your father kept murmuring. You were so little and couldn’t fully comprehend words yet, but even years later you remembered his mantra. “Late, very late… Shouldn’t be this late.”

Your mother screeched at him from the kitchen. She emerged covered head to toe in flour and looking like a mad ghost come in from the powdery snow outside. Your brother shrieked with laughter. His mouth was full of cookies and your father scolded him for making a mess on the floor, raising a hand to him. Mother would have nearly killed him then had not a strong, solid knock sounded at the door making them both jump and quiet down.

It was a mad scramble. Coats and hats billowed into the house with the powder snow, melting into two very red nosed familiar looking people with blonde hair and dark eyes. Your father was overjoyed, nearly yelping with excitement. There were two people: a man and a woman, and both nearly towered over your mother as they said their solemn greetings and distributed packages to everyone except you. Jonas was brought proudly forward by mother, puffing his chest and looking smug. The two newcomers looked at each other, exchanged mutual grimaces, and nodded their greetings. Jonas’ mouth was still full of crumbs, and when your father pulled the two into the living room you saw mother discreetly try to wipe his mouth clean.

Your father called your name breathlessly.

“Come...! Come here darling.”

He beckoned to you from your hiding place like a pet. The ground tilted from underneath you as he lifted you in his arms to present you to the two stern faces. You wondered at the time why he introduced you as “sister” when you only had one sibling that was now protesting loudly at his mother.

“-sister. This is your sister.”

From what you remembered you didn’t dislike them. They had very pleasant looking faces and were quiet. Reminiscent of your father in curious ways; here the woman’s nose was long and pointed just like his, and the man wore thick spectacles with his blonde fluffy hair in wisps across his forehead just like your father did before he grew out his hair. When the man leaned in closer to inspect you, he looked just like your father did whenever you had an injury and he needed to see how serious it was. Because you could not tell the difference between the two when he looked at you like that, you leaned forward with him and kissed him softly on the cheek. There was a loud, indignant huff from your mother. The stranger seemed to soften, and he looked kindly at you as the woman handed you a soft toy that you hugged tightly until your mother took it away. You liked the new people. When they came in the room the screaming stopped, and all was peaceful.

For some reason things didn’t escalate from there. The real trouble waited until dinnertime, when your mother had been passing out food with a vengeance. Jonas had gravy all over his face. The two carbon copies of your father watched him with mutual disgust while the original, bless him, had kept on forgetting he was to be feeding you. The man was sitting next to you, and occasionally he’d help you out while father babbled on and on with his excitement. In the midst of trying to navigate your fork and a piece of ham with chubby fingers, a sharp, piercing scream made you drop the silverware and jump when it clattered to the plate. There was a dangerous, rapt silence, and then hell broke loose.

You had been sitting on your father’s lap when he suddenly forgot you were there. Chubby hands flailed helplessly as he stood and sent you plummeting to the floor. Your head knocked against the solid floor and you saw stars, while the strangers began screaming back with full force at your mother. Jonas had joined in at some point because you could hear his nasally voice piercing into the shouting, and amidst all the shoes stomping and voices merging into one giant cacophony that you couldn’t comprehend you felt trapped. Not once did your wails join them. With every fiber of your being you held your throbbing head and tried not to cry. Tears spilled out of your eyes from the pain in your head and the screams that pierced your eardrums, but your father didn’t come get you like he usually would.

From under the table you could see his shoes chasing after those that belonged to the two strangers. The ugly clodhoppers that Jonas wore daily disappeared into the hallway, while your mother’s heels and her scream crying carried on into the back of the house where a door slammed, and the front door banged against the wall. There were a few more distant outbursts from the outside: Father’s plaintive wailing. The scream of the woman and the man’s barking anger. Eventually that too disappeared in a whirl of snow as the candles burned low, and the cold came and made you shiver violently. You whispered your mother’s name (you didn’t call her mother then), and then you whispered desperately for your father.

Looking back on it now, you thought about how your step siblings must have felt being put out of the house by your jealous mother. Werner and Gretel, your father’s children from his first marriage, had come that Christmas to see him for the first time in nearly four years. Sometimes, whenever the loneliness was too much to bear, you wondered if your father would have made them vampires too, had they survived the bombings in Berlin. Jonas was later killed in action. Your mother either was killed or killed herself, you weren’t sure, and you weren’t about to ask your father about it. Maybe it would have been different. Jonas knew the twins for four short years of his life, yet you’d only met them once. Life might have turned out so differently…

Maybe Werner would have been kind. Maybe Gretel would have taught you how to be sweet and delicate, the picture of femininity. There are so many maybes. In a way you feel cheated out of a family. You had doting siblings (your father says they loved you when they met you), and as usual mother had to go in and mess things up. It wasn’t fair. That’s the thought you always came back to. And you never understood why, when the bombs destroyed your house, your father had gone back alone to the charred remains and saved the kitchen table out of all the possessions inside. You’d snuck back out there to the house in Dresden once on your own to reclaim your mother’s jewelry and a few photographs, and when you decided to hide them away in the Opera House’s storage you found the old kitchen table amongst the personal possessions of the Last Battalion.

You had to find out. That Christmas had plagued you so many times, and you wondered why your father would keep the refuge you had sought from the screaming when you were four.

“Dad?”

You tiptoed into your father’s lab. He’d been working away with a serious expression on his face for the past week while the soldiers partied and lived their last month. The Doctor had been in a particularly sour mood, had even chastised you for every little thing you did wrong. Eventually you decided you needed a break from him, and you had convinced the Major that you needed to be close to him while your father had a meltdown. The kommandant had been generous. He’d read to you from a book he’d been reading about natural history and cuddled you until you felt the lab was safe. In a rare moment of equality, you felt brave enough to tell him the reason you were avoiding your father. He listened quietly and offered his advice, urging you to face your fears and ask the question that had been nagging at the back of your mind.

“Daddy?”

Doctor Avondale Napyeer glanced up, the seriousness of his spider-like face melting into the kind, tired grin of the father you were familiar with.

“ _Schatzi_.” he said with relief. “Where have you been?”

“Avoiding you.” you teased in English. “Are you still angry with me papa?”

Doctor shook his head vigorously, opening his arms for you to crawl into.

“Never.” he murmured into your hair when you entered his embrace. “Only… I wish you would listen to me. You shouldn’t sneak out like that anymore, listen to your father.”

“I always do.” you assured him. “I just like to get out and breathe the fresh air sometimes. Which reminds me, why’d you get the table from the kitchen?”

In his old age your father had this tendency to play dumb about things. He did it now, his brows contorting in confusion and a gloved hand scratching his head like a buffoon while he murmured to himself in German.

“What table? What kitchen?” he asked in broken English. As though he didn’t have the ability to speak perfectly without an accent with all his doctorates and schooling.

“Dad.” you spoke softly and slowly. “I went to the storage. You have that big ass mahogany table from the house in Dresden sitting in there with the Captain’s chest of drawers. Why did you go back for it? That thing’s so old it’s crumbling into dust.”

“Ah… Ich weiß es nicht… I didn’t get any tables…”

You argued back and forth like this, sometimes in English, mostly in German. He was pretending not to understand you, complaining like an irate old man about these kids today and their “fashionable” English while you argued back at him in German about the table. It continued for nearly an hour, you became increasingly frustrated until you told him the reason why you’d gone back.

“I wanted mom’s jewels.” you told him. He called you a thief in German until you said. “You didn’t like mom anyways, and I figured what the hell do we need her shit for? We could sell some of it. Get some money. Maybe go out of this zeppelin together and romp around Germany one last time?”

“You could have asked me.” Doctor responded, shaking his head. “Stealing… I raised you better than that. She would have been so disappointed with you. She would have loved you, you know.”

“Mom?”

“Nein, nein…” he shook his head and turned back to his work, suddenly lucid. “That was a monster, but your step mother would have been ashamed with you. You do not steal. We don’t need that creature’s things. Only the things from step mother.”

“Step mother?”

Doctor pretended to ignore you. Fingers tapping at a keyboard a mile a minute until you stopped him. When he looked at you, it was then you remembered he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He looked frail and confused. Others feared him and called him a monster, but only you saw the frightening reality that this shrunken creature was your father. His memory was going even though he effectively froze himself in time to fifty five. Often he was sullen, lonely, grumpy because he couldn’t have the freedom he had at twenty two, or even thirty six.

“Why’d you need it dad?” you asked. “Why?”

He didn’t answer. He only retreated further into his shell and continued to look on at his work, silently typing and on occasion pointing out interesting points of his research to you.

“Look here.” he said, jabbing the screen with an index finger. “Isn’t that fascinating?”

Time stopped. Reversed. You were four years old again and it was Christmas Eve. You were hiding under the table, shivering and crying because of the commotion. Wondering if anyone was going to come and get you and console you over your hurting head. The table sheltered you from prying eyes, yet allowed you to see your father enter the house and close the door behind him. You watched quietly, too afraid to call out to him. Now that you think of it, he had to have been crying. He always cried when there wasn’t anyone around, taking off his glasses and burying his head in his hands while his shoulders shook with silent sobs. It had to have been an hour, maybe two, before he must have seen your tiny foot peeking from beneath the table. Immediately he sniffled and cleaned his tears before kneeling on the floor to look at you under the table.

“What are you doing down there?” he’d asked. You’d been unable to answer, yet readily you let him scoop you up into his arms where he held you close, making clicking sounds with his tongue when he saw the large lump on your head and trying to be of comfort. Doctor had taken you to the window and showed you the snow outside. Perhaps you’d seen the footprints hurrying away from the house. You didn’t remember any of that. You just remembered how quiet he’d been, how contemplative and full of secrets this man was, and even in the present you could not quite bridge the gap between the two of you.

“Look here.” he’d said, jabbing the glass with an index finger. “Isn’t that fascinating?”

Yes… it was fascinating, this thing called memory.


End file.
